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Alpine 01 E38 M sport project

Just picked it up yesterday. Already ordered a whole bunch of stuff for it. Apex ARC-8's, Bridgestone Potenza pole position tires, NBT retrofit, gloss black kidneys, Brembo GT front BBK, Alpina lip and some other stuff. I plan on doing an S62/6 speed swap with ESS supercharger. The tan interior will be dyed caramel and black 750 upper dash will go in along with black carpet and alcantara headliner.

Dude!!! What a score. I really NEEEEED THaT car in my life... No others will do, only that particular single car... I'm coming for it... Omg
I'm so Fcuking jealous of you, the only words that come to mind are all explicatory and profane

Looks like a cool build. Im not too well versed in E38's, did any come with Alcantara headliners in the US? The caramel will also look great, AW M5s with caramel are a great combo cant wait to see it on an e38

That was the plan. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to save money by buying a lesser car to start. Over the years I have realized, start with the best possible car for any project and you will save and have a better result in the end.

That was the plan. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to save money by buying a lesser car to start. Over the years I have realized, start with the best possible car for any project and you will save and have a better result in the end.

especially when u score an amazing deal!!!! 7k for that is an unreal type of find... So yes YOU will save $$$ in the end, but... And yes in theory spending money to save money in the future is a good concept to grasp, many have a hard time grasping it tho... Dibbs on the motor if u didn't see my other three posts about it... :P

The motor will be available. Trying to determine value. It's perfect but has a CPS sensor error and has slight leak from timing cover on passenger side. There is zero chain or vanos noise as you can see from Paul's posts in the E38 section.

The car is currently in Charlotte with Paul (blackknight530i) who is pulling the interior. He will be installing the NBT retrofit and black carpet. He is also taking all the lower stuff, seats and door cards to Brian (Redshift) with fibernew to dye all the tan caramel. Then the car will be coming to me.

I will post the quotes from Paul since he is updating my E38 section build thread while in possession of the car. He already built my M5 cluster as well. Grey face with white LED's, the first ordered in this combo

Originally Posted by blackknight530i

He's shipping it to me to get the work started on the interior swap. He lives in Richmond, VA, so it's quite a bit longer of a drive on an unknown car that hasn't been driven much over it's lifetime.

He cleared me to say that he paid $7k for the car. Inorite?!

Here's some more pics he just told me to post:

The seat and door card redying will likely be done by Redshift and his company Fibrenew in Raleigh and I'll be taking them up there to him. If you guys are wondering about him, he's the one that did my M5 seats in my 530i, so you can check out the work he did on those in my build thread. He does fantastic work and this one will be more of the same.

Originally Posted by blackknight530i

Ok, car was delivered to me today after several delays due to a flat tire on the transport truck on the way up, but Brandon wanted me to post some pics, so here you go:

Engine Bay:

A bit of rust on the oil filter housing bracket, but this will be changed out when doing the S62 swap, so no worries:

There was a slight crack in the radiator at some point around the upper inlet neck and it sprayed all over the hood blanket, the wiring near the headlight, the oil filter housing bracket, fan shroud, etc, but it appears to have a new radiator, so all is well. A good cleaning on that while the engine is out will make it look nice and new again. If it gets a M5 fan shroud and radiator, it will be unnecessary anyways.

And the interior. This interior is unbelievably nice. The seats are super supple and clean. I've never felt seats this soft in an e38/e39 before, so it was quite an experience. The instrument cluster has very likely been replaced by BMW at some point, because all pixels work and it being a FL car for it's whole life would have destroyed a regular cluster. I'm pretty sure it's one of the 2004+ clusters that shouldn't ever have pixels fail, but he's putting the M5 one in with the white LEDs and it's a 2004+ anyways, so no loss. The headliner is not perfect, but not bad at all. In a couple spots, you can see where the foam is deteriorating underneath the fabric. It's not bad enough to sag anywhere, but there are a couple places it looks like it was touched or bumped and it didn't come back out evenly. All that will be Alcantara in the future anyways, so no loss there either.

All the Vavona trim is immaculate, though could probably use a polish to get rid of some swirls, but no cracks. The StarTAC phone cable was basically destroyed by the sun, but more than likely I would imagine he'll put a standard cell phone delete cubby there or cut the cable off like I did on mine. It also came with two sets of what look to be OE floor mats. One set is the original and has the BMW embroidered in the driver side floor mat, but the other set appear the same, minus the BMW lettering. The trunk mat looked like it was completely unused and it comes with the factory netting.

The subwoofer speakers are blown and sound pretty awful when you turn up any bass, but the rest of the speakers sound decent. The nav display seems to have all its pixels, but it appears that the polarizer was messed up or something, because you have to look at it at a certain angle to be able to see it, like looking at a negative of it. It's going to be replaced anyways.

The sunroof glass needs to be adjusted as one side rear part is a bit lower than the roof and the other side rear is above the roof and it's the opposite on the front edge. I'll be doing that to hopefully fix the wind noise issues Brandon mentioned to me. Shouldn't be a difficult fix.

Here's the interior pics:

Driver door had a bit of dirt around the handle, possibly from the driver of the transport truck:

In the next few pics, the lighter color over the tan is from the windows in my garage letting light through, not discoloration of the interior:

Exterior. The exterior is surprisingly nice, but there are some very minor flaws. Nothing that can't be easily dealt with, but Brandon wanted full disclosure.

There is a small rock chip that has caused a small dent on the hood about in the middle. There is a small rock chip on the driver side fender. The passenger side grill has broken clips, so it doesn't stay in place well, but the driver side one is perfect. I wish my passenger side grille was in good shape, as I would just swap it over for him. The OE side marker lens gaskets are torn and kind of hanging out around the outer edges of them, but I'm going to put my all clear turn signal lenses on instead. It'll look awesome with the Alpine White and the nearly new looking headlight lenses. Speaking of the headlight lenses, it looks like the passenger side lens was hit by something and has a pretty good size crack in it, but getting a new OE lens will make it match the driver side one perfectly, so no worries there.

The cowl rubber around the bottom of the windshield is all cracked and a bunch of pieces have broken off, so he's going to be replacing that. There is a tiny scratch in the passenger side fender that looks like someone tried to touch it up with some wrong color touch up paint at some point, or it could possibly be some plaster like substance that dripped on the fender. My buddy is going to be detailing the exterior of the car with some paint correction, so we'll see if it's something to worry about or if it goes away easily.

The drip rails are missing the rubber on the rear 'C' pieces and the driver side one has separated from its clips. I could fix the clip problem with some epoxy or 3m adhesive tape like I did, but the missing rubber makes that fix moot. Getting new ones would probably be the best course of action, but it will require repainting the shadowline trim around the windows so it all matches. It's just a bit sun-faded currently.

The trunk struts are pretty much shot, so new ones are in order. Fortunately, they are pretty cheap.

Ok, time for the performance/ride quality/issues part. Me and a couple friends took a drive around to test the ride quality, performance and general maintenance of the car. I had my buddy ride in the back to see how it rode back there and how the seats felt, and he's like, "this is how this car was supposed to be", so good report from there. The A/C worked well enough, but I'm starting to think that it just doesn't work as well as the e39 system, since both my e39s feel way colder, while my e38 feels pretty much the same. The suspension felt perfect for the car. It wasn't too stiff, nor too soft and seemed to handle exactly as a low mileage suspension should, but I understand that Brandon had the car on the lift and noticed that the rubber boots on the control arms were all shot, so I'm guessing those will be replaced in short order preventatively to keep them from failing prematurely. The drivetrain felt perfect, with no slop in the on/off throttle, no weird noises, no play, no shuddering and the transmission shifted perfectly through the gears. We checked it in normal and sport mode and sport mode seemed to be holding the gears pretty long, which I think is pretty normal, but I don't have autos anymore. Normal mode felt perfect for this car.

Performance was quite good, but it felt sluggish at low RPMs for some reason. In checking the codes after I got it back, it has a CPS bank 1 code, so I'm thinking changing that out might restore the lost performance. I also noticed that the accelerator pedal feels like a cable driven one, which is indicative of the early pedals that were improved upon with the e39 pedals in 2002+ or so. It's not necessarily a problem, but having a newer pedal will definitely improve the response feel from the engine. I did it on my e38 and it's much better.

There was a ABS/DSC/Brake trifecta on it, but I cleared the codes and it hadn't come back, though I haven't driven it yet to see if they come back. It did have a code for one of the ABS sensors giving an implausible value, so if that code comes back, I'll swap it with one of mine and see if it fixes it. I haven't been able to clear the DSC code though saying that the Steering Angle Sensor needs to be calibrated. I've tried to calibrate it and make sure it and the DSC module were matched, but it just doesn't want to clear the code in the DSC module, so I'm going to try to swap it with my DSC module and see if that fixes it. I recall having to do this on Redshift's M5T and replacing the module and coding it fixed the problem.

Overall, the car is super amazing, especially at the price he got it for. It's got just enough flaws that he won't feel bad modifying it, but it's nice enough that it's worth doing all these mods with it. Brandon, you're a lucky guy. I'm sure I'm going to get the talk from my neighbor thinking I've really started a used BMW car lot though .

Originally Posted by blackknight530i

Ok, so here's the start of the actual build thread. Here she was at the start of the day on a beautiful morning in NC (don't worry, it got much hotter and muggier later in the day).

First, I wanted to get the shadowline trim drip rails off in preparation for Brandon's new ones coming in. I wanted to get a good idea of how many clips were on each side since I know they tend to break (and they did). Brandon ordered enough, plus a couple extra, so we should be good. I'll mount the new pieces, then paint the whole length of the old and new drip rails with Rust-O-Leum 2-in-1 paint and primer (which worked great on my e38) so that it's a nice even color for the whole length, instead of brand new rear pieces attached to old faded pieces (I know, hard to believe, right?).

Next I decided to attempt to adjust his sunroof, since he said he was having some wind noise issues. Before I started, the front edge was sitting a bit above the roof, while the rear edge was sitting below the roof. I was able to get the passenger side just right, with the front edge right below the roof and the rear edge right above it:

Front edge:

Rear edge:

Unfortunately, I didn't have as much success on the driver side. I could get the front edge right below the roof, but I couldn't get the rear edge above the roof. I think the lift support might be a bit worn out or slightly out of alignment. Brandon can pull the sunroof cassette when he has his headliner done and check for certain and possibly replace the parts then if he wants.

Front edge:

Rear edge:

Then it was time to pull the seats. I started with the rears:

Then the fronts:

I think I have a seat problem

That's it for today. The main thing was to get the seats removed so I can take them up to Brian's for caramel dyeing. All door cards and dash are either coming out of my e38 or they were already uninstalled since I bought them for my e38 and never installed them. The main things from that car that need to come out are the rear door cards, but I'll need to pull the seats and console just to get the carpets out to put in Brandon's later. I also want to have all that stuff out of my e38 so that when I bring it back from Brian's, I can have it loaded with a bunch of parts from his house that needs to go to the scrapyard. It's going to be loud driving to Raleigh with no carpets in the car, LOL.